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cronjobber

1,527 karma · joined December 29, 2014

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cronjobber··on IPv6 Adoption
I stand corrected, RFC 4038 seems to be what I was looking for. But it seems to be a late addition, and OS support is optional. If developers think moving their apps to IPv6 is too complicated, I can't fault them.
cronjobber··on IPv6 Adoption
IPv6 could have done three things. First, embed the "legacy" address space. Second, have legacy-to-legacy connections use v4 on the wire. Third, strongly encourage existing user-maintained configuration (config file formats etc.) to remain perfectly valid as long as they don't use v6 addresses (or other v6 features.)

You are right, you'd still need a "legacy" address to connect to "true" v4 servers, but that address would be all you need, while most operating systems, routers, client and server software could be, technically, all-v6 all-the-time by now.

cronjobber··on IPv6 Adoption
It sucks at being compatible with ipv4. The "billion dollar mistake" :-)

It also sucks at having software/hardware stacks nearly as well debugged as those for ipv4, which means running ipv6 at all is a security risk.

Nobody would switch for sundry technical advantages. The main driver for conversion is that ipv4 addresses are scarce. As soon as "we" seriously "move to ipv6", however, the scarcity driven pressure to convert is relieved. We're bound to reach an equilibrium that will include ipv4 for a long time, possibly forever.

cronjobber··on IPv6 Adoption
"We" don't have to move to ipv6, even if "they" have to. The internet can plausibly support both protocols forever.
cronjobber··on Amazon raised Prime Day prices, misleading consumers, says vendor
From the article: "It’s not like they’re bumping it by a buck and making a little bit more money. They are really tanking sales and it kind of has a ripple effect to us, being a small company trying to do demand planning"

The relevant Econ 101 buzzword isn't "supply and demand," it's "agency problem".

Amazon is "tanking sales" unilaterally, while the supplier manages stock on assumptions of higher sales at the regular, lower price point.

cronjobber··on Snopes asks community for donations
For entertainment purposes only:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fac...

cronjobber··on How a VC-funded company is undermining the open-source community
Google introduced and normalized the spyware/adware business model. Nothing but fawning adoration from programmers.

Microsoft copied the model for operating systems. Token resistance from programmers.

Kite copies the model for programming tools. Too late, programmers.

cronjobber··on Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?
> Economics and politics haven't caught up with this yet.

That seems unlikely. Political and economic leadership throughout the "White West" has been subsidizing and expanding the non-productive underclass for decades.

cronjobber··on Google launches Hire, a new service for helping businesses recruit
> but what solution do you have?

It isn't easy, but as long as nation states are plausibly more powerful than Google, we—humanity—can hope.

Use antitrust to inhibit moves like the one under discussion.

Use privacy legislation to plug the Google data vacuum nozzle.

Suspend net neutrality in ways calculated to allow ISPs to suck Google dry, while not hurting anybody else too much.

cronjobber··on Defense of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop offers case study on how to sell snake oil
You are wrong, like most homeopathy critics.

Have you ever observed typical homeopathy users—middle to upper-middle class mothers of young children—in their natural habitat?

I have. They're all "true believers" in that they really think homeopathic remedies are useful, for themselves and their kids. And yet, despite that, they also exhibit a well developed instinct on when not to rely on homeopathy and send themselves or the child off to a "real" medical practitioner. Strange, isn't it?

It ceases to be inexplicably strange if you think about their shared belief in homeopathy as a socially evolved strategy about how to keep themselves and (more crucially) their children away from doctors in those plentiful cases of minor sniffies where a doctor is overkill and actually more likely to do harm than do any better than "doing nothing".

The sad thing is that society doesn't allow a mother to just "do nothing". Where there's no accepted alternative, she "must" visit a doctor, lest she be accused of neglecting her duty to care for her children.

That's why it seems that some parts of society—and not the stereotypically "stupid" ones at all—have evolved mechanisms that afford them social license to avoid the doctor when the doctor is more likely to do harm than good.

cronjobber··on What is “modern” programming?
Most of your comments would be vastly improved by omitting the reams of repl output.
cronjobber··on Google bans its ads on sites that use annoying ‘pop-unders’
Because my reading of the article is that Google doesn't restrict the policy to Google ads.

> publishers have to also be responsible for any ad networks or affiliates they have on their site which could use these methods

That may or may not be turn out to be legally anti competitive, but it certainly merits an investigation.

My personal opinion is that it is a clear abuse of G's market dominant position.

cronjobber··on Google bans its ads on sites that use annoying ‘pop-unders’
Antitrust regulators should look into this one.

EDIT: ...because the policy punishes advertisers use of other advertising providers.

cronjobber··on Kaspersky Lab Has Been Working with Russian Intelligence
True. Sadly.

Alas, while Russian (and Chinese) general disinterest in f'ing with you does help, their equally developed general disinterest in your well-being means they might have incentive to sell or trade with entities more... interested.

cronjobber··on Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment
> What do you think?

I have no way of knowing how such changes would affect the wider installed base of FSet. All I can tell you is what I'd prefer myself.

I wouldn't mind, and actually prefer, if the default SEQ would signal a condition on out-of-bounds access (I'd also suspect that not a lot of existing code would break, but there's no way for me to know that.)

On the other hand, I don't think I'd get much besides having to rewrite code out of map lookups signaling a condition. I glossed over my uses of LOOKUP. For most lookups, the case of some element not being present in the map is normal behavior, expected and handled.

For a minority, an element not being present is an error, but for a majority of those, a specific error message is appropriate, so there'd still be explicit checking and no advantage from signaling within LOOKUP.

The smallest group of LOOKUPS expects the lookup to succeed without checking. In all of these cases, the lookup will succeed unless some code is buggy, and in all cases, a bogus NIL would be consumed immediately by a function that would signal a condition on getting a NIL.

So my personal favorite default kind of map would return (VALUES NIL NIL) for lookup failures but would not have a default for purposes of the MAP-UNION etc protocols.

An alternative (or additional) change that would work for me would be an additional optional function parameter to MAP-UNION and friends which, if present, would handle default values.

cronjobber··on Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment
You are right, the 1960 paper describes a language that is a pure functional language. I think it even was the first published pure functional language (pointers to earlier work welcome, of course).
cronjobber··on Show HN: A notebook-style Common Lisp environment
Does Clojure predate FSet? If you hadn't written "now" here, I'd have guessed otherwise.

My only complaint about FSet would be map default values; not necessarily the fact they exist, but (1) when using defaults, that two maps can compare equal even though they have different defaults, and (2) when not using defaults, the way they nevertheless intrude upon the map-union protocol, necessitating handling of otherwise unused default values (usually NIL).

But I love FSet when using CL. Thank you for writing and publishing it!

cronjobber··on In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration
Dupe, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697330
cronjobber··on Language Server Protocol, Rust and Emacs
Incremental recompilation isn't fast enough to wait for between keystrokes, so in-process servers would run in their own thread. Along with accounting for arbitrarily incompatible language runtimes and memory management schemes, wouldn't we be looking at badly re-implementing half of a process-and-ipc infrastructure here, just without memory protection?

Agreed on JSON, though.

cronjobber··on In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration
> Some population groups are surviving hybrids but the percentage is very small

The pure genotypes were obviously out-competed, surviving Europeans and (East?) Asians are descendants of hybrids.

Aside 1:

> Asian is much less AFAIK, it's mostly a European thing)

Latest I heard is that it's actually the other way around, East Asians are more N. than Europeans.

Aside 2:

> my own Neanderthal percentage is just 2.4%, so I'm actually almost more Jewish than Neanderthal

So you've been told that you're mumble percent Jewish? Have you verified that you don't just happen to have a bunch of perfectly European genes that—even though characteristic for Ashkenazic Jews—are not at all unique to them because of their >60% European admixture?

cronjobber··on The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
Timing. Where do you think G slots in the timeline, relative to the Latin classics?
cronjobber··on In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration
How's wot? As far as I have been informed, [1] surviving Europeans/Asians are Neanderthalized (hybrids), and [2] no pure Neanderthals are living today.
cronjobber··on In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration
And yet Neanderthalized hybrids are the only known survivors coming out of whatever happened between those species.
cronjobber··on Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
> But we need a common API ... so that people can use their favourite tools

Yup, that's exactly what made the internet great in the good old days.

But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools instead of yours?

cronjobber··on The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
Sure, G wasn't "originally" part of the Latin alphabet—until they invented that letter.
cronjobber··on RFC: Evolving Rust Through Epochs
For a little language I designed, I decided that keeping the evolutionary pathway open means introducing new keywords once in a while. But we don't want to break existing code; code is expensive. Valuable. We don't want to break valuables!

So I added a mandatory file header to the language which (amongst other things) specified the language version.

I thought this was a win... with one exception that would have bothered me a lot if this had been a language intended to achieve world domination:

Mandatory version headers totally ruin your "hello, world!" comparison chart story ;-)

cronjobber··on Can Microbes Encourage Altruism?
If humans had parasites that would encourage them to be altruists against their interest and for the sole benefit of their parasites—which is of course implausible and hypothetical and absolutely not even possible—would they make us downvote and flag comments on HN discussing the possibility of parasites manipulating humans to be altruists against their interest?
cronjobber··on The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
I'll take this cum cranulo salis.
cronjobber··on The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography
Sure about the G?
cronjobber··on German MPs vote for new law to fine social media companies over illegal content
That would be fun, what with the ultimate dispute resolution procedure against a sovereign Google being the lobbing of heavy ordnance at Kinakuta Googleplex until they cease and desist :)
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